Labour pretends to be progressive, but in fact its agenda is one of social control, reducing the public to serfdom as more and more depend on the state for either work or welfare.

What’s needed is to take Neil Kinnock’s famous warning not to be old, poor or sick under the Tories and show that currently it is the old who are being abandoned by the inadequacies of state-run policing, the poor by state education and the sick by state health care. But who will do so? Labour is the problem; the Lib Dems don’t understand what a problem is; and the Tories run away from the problem, because to tackle it means taking great political risks over such things as welfarism, Europe and the cult of public sentimentality.